Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (review)

Richard Wood has picked a topic at the underdeveloped intersection of several too-distinct subfields in sociology: faith- and identity-based community organizing. More significantly, his topic is at the heart, he argues, the best chance at democratic renewal in the U.S. With the sort of passion that produces the best social science, that is, a vigorous commitment to discover the truth about critical questions, he has produced a book that not only is worthy of serious consideration, but also forcefully demonstrates the importance of his topic. His book will inspire other researchers.

Starting with a moral and political concern about economic inequality in the U.S., Wood made a good decision in focusing not on trying to figure out the absence of the kind of broad national social movement that commonly grabs scholarly attention, but instead on the community-based organizing on inequality that actually is taking place. He offers intensive observation and analysis of two related organizing efforts in Oakland, California. The first, affiliated with the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO), is coordinated through a committee based in a Catholic Church. Although its efforts are explicitly ecumenical, religious imagery and the words of Old Testament prophets are central to its organizing. The second, employing a model developed by the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), runs through a community-based organization, People United for a Better Oakland (PUEBLO). Led primarily by women, its efforts focus on very poor and working-class people, and its rhetoric emphasizes racial identity, albeit multiracial.

Thick descriptions of each case reflect extensive fieldwork, buttressed by in-depth interviews with 70 activists, allow the reader to get a good feel of context, strategy, and even the drama of staged confrontations with local officials. By conducting explicitly comparative work about community organizing within Oakland, Wood was able to learn, and to describe, the complicated economic and political context. Effectively holding that context constant allows him to put the differences between two different styles of organizing in high relief.

Organizing poor people is always an uphill struggle. Even when activists successfully apply pressure to local officials or businesses, the targets of poor peoples' pressure are themselves so severely constrained that all victories are very small, and often short-lived, for example: better police responsiveness; creation of charter schools and new programs; improved street lights; construction of a supermarket in a neighborhood served only by convenience stores; and, most frequently, political inclusion through more meetings. To be sure, such responses aren't trivial and improve the quality of some lives but cannot begin to redress large structural inequalities.

Clear about the limits of direct influence of the poor on policy, Wood's analysis is most helpful in understanding how organizers mobilize and sustain participation in adverse circumstances. The people they organize know that their prospects for influence are limited, and that the lack the requisite resources to be effective in conventional politics. PICO and CTWO have developed strategies that emphasize identity, ideology, community, confrontation, and drama. Both explicitly aim to politicize and train citizens.

For PICO, congregations provide somewhat more diverse communities than are found elsewhere in American life. The language of religion, and even more pointedly, the belief in the divine, offer not only a common vocabulary but also an ideological context for political action — even in the face of defeats. Organizers cultivate ties with clergy, who can then mobilize groups of people, but one-to-one meetings among members provide the invisible infrastructure of organization building. Meetings feature prayer and readings of scripture, contextualizing community issues in a larger web of values. And meetings with officials, at least public meetings, are always staged to emphasize confrontation and drama — "pinning" targets to commitments — a sharp break from more conventional politics.

CTWO's race-based organizing is remarkably similar on most dimensions, including...